The day will come when B.C. will no longer denote a time before Christ. Human history has entered a period of irrevocable change unlike any since the birth of our Lord and Savior. I believe B.C. will eventually designate a time “Before COVID-19.” Every aspect of every life has been altered to some degree. Everyone is very tired.

I am lucky to be feeling refreshed by an earlier visit with the apple of my eye, my 2-year-old grandson. He, both my daughters, and my son all hung out this afternoon. We do not see each other as much as we need to. The loss is dearly felt. These gatherings that once restored our hope and lifted our spirits are harder to arrange in the age of the virus that has changed everything. Haunting thoughts of a dire future for them magnify my pain and dampen my joy.

I hope we did enough to get them on a good path in life.

My children barely depart before the fear that nothing may ever again see the empathy, the love and compassion it enjoyed Before COVID-19 settles right back in. It all seems so fragile. Will anyone ever have the time or the will to teach others the way so many took the time to teach me about my career, life, love, anything? I work tomorrow night in my capacity as a registered nurse.

I am already dreading the staffing shortages, low morale and decline in quality of care while suffering the shame of knowing that these will render us incapable of doing our best. Work dominates my life. Those who are able, run away. Those unable to run away do what they can while trying to limit the mistakes that being short-staffed, exhausted, and poorly trained — in some instances — tend to bring. All enabling work to further dominate my life.

My heart aches every time I hear a seasoned nurse with years of invaluable experience plotting an expedited retirement from the profession we both love. How much pain, how much fear and how much ignorance did it take to shake the ironclad will of these veterans with years of nursing battles and vast wisdom?

I know my profession is not unique in these losses, but now it feels more acute, more personal among nurses. These are less coworkers and more comrades at arms, brothers and sisters of the syringe, protectors of a sacred code none of us lightly betray.

Feelings of failure taunt my nursing practice these days because it seems that newly minted nurselings are deprived of the guidance and support needed to cement what they have learned in nursing school. No one has the emotional currency to invest in being a mentor and confidant. You do things yourself instead of investing the time to really teach it to someone. You step around a challenge to make up for the constant increase in effort required to complete the acceptable minimum required for your own assignments.

This always tastes like defeat.

Many have practiced nursing in more oppressive settings for longer periods of time than this writer. I only spent a few weeks working directly with patients afflicted with this pestilence upon humanity. I work for an agency on 13-week contracts. The five facilities I have been employed in since March 2020 all suffered similar erosion of empathy and commitment to excel.

I am also guilty of much of that to which I have borne witness. My confidence, my love and my hope have become coveted by me in order to protect my own sense of well-being. My wife would wake me from my disturbed sleep during my time working the COVID unit. She would report names of sick, dead or dying patients that I was crying out in my sleep. Those nights, I could hear her lying next to me awake with worry despite my empty reassurances of there being nothing to worry about.

Well, more than a year later and I still remember the names of the spouses and children of the men and women I watched fight to live and lose. There were many patients who we discharged home with a great outcome. These are, in fact, the vast majority. I personally witnessed several happy reunions between recovered COVID-19 patients and the families who prayed for their return. These memories are precious to me.

They are not the ones I dream about.

The biggest piece of my subconscious is reserved for the patient for whom I held his ipad while he and his wife shared the sweetest expression of love for their 36-year marriage. They recounted an amazing life of closeness. Their legacy is a wonderful family of stable, productive and proud children who also raised outstanding children. For 15 minutes they reviewed a life well lived and well loved. It was the single most emotional thing I have ever seen.

Then he was intubated and put on a ventilator.

He died a week later.

He frequents my dreams even now. I will carry his memory to my grave along with a few others. Even my faith in science has been shaken by these memories, with an assist from the coronavirus. When I was admitting him he was alert, affable and charming; a guy you would love to watch a game with.

When I checked his blood oxygen levels, though, he was in the 70s. That is incongruent with my experience. How long was he walking around with this critical clinical value? People who are in the 70s are usually in apparent distress but not during the age of COVID-19, which has changed everything. And there does not appear to be any end to the onslaught. It even bends the parameters of known science.

I have always been good at stomping down my emotions in front of patients. But I cried in the linen room with no one around like a man is supposed to. Nowadays I have had to pretend something is in my eye and slink away in shame.

That extra emotion is an absolute liability in a business where projecting calm and professionalism is essential.

Indecisiveness can be as destructive as negligence.

The fastest acting poison in my business is personal doubt. The day I start losing confidence in myself, my colleagues, all the doctors, — and most importantly — every one of my patients will be able to smell it … like dog crap.

Nothing will ever again be as it was B.C.: Before COVID-19.